Any any student of philosophy knows, Plato and Aristotle both had accounts the human soul such that the soul can be seen as consisting of three basic “parts.” What’s more, even though the two renditions differ in important ways, in each case the respective thinker argues that, in some sense, human reason is “above” desire. That is, both Plato and Aristotle think that the flourishing of the human individual involves some kind of “program” in which reason’s proper role is to somehow manage, control, oversee, or discipline human desire in all its manifold variety.
It has taken me a long time to grasp a certain way in which this picture, nevertheless, gets “tweaked” in an important way, at least by the mainstream neoplatonist tradition, and I’m shocked that I have not explicitly blogged about this before.
According to neoplatonism, and in particular Christian neoplatonism, while it is true in terms of traditional “faculty theory” that it is the job of rationality to keep human desire in check, what’s equally true is that there is an additional kind of “desire” which is “above” both psychic faculties of reason (logos; ratio) and desire (horexis; epithumia; thumos). (Somewhat related to this is this.)
Now, why does all this matter, and why should you care? Two reasons: mythos and mysticism.
First, mythos. More and more, I’m convinced that for the Christian mythos is privileged over logos. That is, it is the Christian story into which we as Christians are called super deeply to delve. With the Feast of the Ascension ringing in my imagination (and its amazing collect), it is truly mind blowing to affirm that Christ ascended into the clouds, and then continued to rise beyond the ability of the disciples to see. Where did he go? The answer to this question, it seems to me, stumps rationality. And yet, it makes for a really good story, which is a way of saying that mythos is closely connected to desire. It is myth, over and over again throughout Christian intellectual history (according to folks like Bonaventure and CS Lewis) which supremely is able to stimulate (and satisfy?) Christian desire.
Second, mysticism. My nifty nutshell “definition” of a mystic is one who is convinced that God wants us to experience God. Not primarily to think about him, but to experience him. If this is the case, if the mystic is correct, then the central role of desire in the Christian life, occupying a position even superior to that of reason, is a very big deal.
Are human beings sinful by nature?
According to philosophers and theologians, this question is an anthropological one, one which many traditional Christians (with a “low anthropology”) will readily answer in the affirmative.
However, if one affirms the innate sinfulness of humanity in this way, one is overlooking a crucial development of history (and thus of temporality). For surely any theologian worth her salt would not deny that man’s sinfulness is the result of what Christians call “the Fall.” But what is the Fall if not an event which (in some sense) has taken place in the world in and through time, an event which (in some sense) has come into being at a specific point in time, but which has no effect at all on the state of affairs which preceded it?
In other words, one can, with at least as much theological integrity, hold that human being is not sinful by nature, insofar as when God created man in his pre-lapsarian state, he was utterly righteous, utterly just, completely devoid of any defect at all.
Now, what is the point of all this, and why bring it up? I am attempting to write a doctoral dissertation on Joseph Ratzinger’s book The Theology of History of St. Bonaventure, in which the Pontiff Emeritus holds that, for the Seraphic Doctor, the logos of history is “first philosophy” (my wording, my gloss). For Ratzinger’s Bonaventure, that is, one cannot know truth, one cannot know what is real, apart from the revelation of certain “events” and their meanings–events which purportedly have taken place in the course of the history of the world. For example, that “in the fullness of time [Lat. plenitudo temporis] God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4).
It seems clear to me that this position–held by Ratzinger’s Bonaventure–is a version of philosophical historicism. It is an example, that is, of the intellectual position which holds that “being gives itself in time,” that, when it comes to human knowing, there are no “timeless truths” or “permanent things,” that one cannot know what is real apart from temporal events and developments, and their valid interpretations. (What constitutes such validity is beyond the scope of this brief article, as indeed is the question “what is time?”.)
The question “are human beings sinful by nature?” is a helpful “prompt” for reflecting on the temporality’s necessity for truth.
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those who sense that reality is mystical and cannot seem to shake this intuitive feeling, and those who don’t.
Of the latter type, think of a secular thinker (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins) who stands up and simply says, “There is no evidence for God.”
The former type, however, is not simply someone who has a new-agey sensibility. Rather, mystics are those who, among other things, remind us that we have forgotten. That is, a mystic is someone who respects the role of memory, or anamnesis.
Saying Morning Prayer this morning (Book of Common Prayer, p. 75), I prayed “Canticle 16,” the Song of Zechariah (BCP, 92), and a couple of things hit me afresh. About halfway through the song appear the lines
free to worship Him without fear / holy and righteous in his sight / all the days of our life.
According to great religious traditions of the West, from Christianity, Islam, & Judaism all the way to the mystery religions of the ancient near eastern Levant, and including the Pythagorean-influenced Platonism that in many ways forms a backdrop to the thought of the Church Fathers (for example), mankind or the human race was primordially positioned in relationship with God, already “worshiping Him without fear.” Whether this is articulated in terms of the Garden of Eden or the prenatal vision of the Platonic Forms, the primordial origin of humanity is one of communion with God.
Well, then, why don’t we modern, western people have any sense of this today? After all, I can’t see God, and there appears to be no evidence for him, or so it seems.
And the answer to this question, coming from the quarters of the the mystical religious traditions mentioned above, is, quite simply, that we have forgotten.
In Collation XV of the Hexaëmeron, speaking of the creation of the world in six days, Bonaventure writes:
The first age, resembling infancy, runs from Adam to Noah…. The first day symbolizes the first time, when light and knowledge were given to man; and this is infancy, which is erased by oblivion. So it is with everything that was done until the time when the Flood wiped out every animal except those that were named by Noah.
Bonaventure is arguing that, when it comes to the reality of God and our experience of God, we have forgotten.
If this is true, then centrally at issue in the religious (and philosophical) life is the task of remembering, recollecting, anamnesis. Hence, the Song of Zechariah, again:
In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us.
What is this mystical experience? Among other things it is the realization that, “Oh, yeah, now I remember, now I get it…. we were created for communion with God … and by grace and faith and all of God’s gifts (reason, creation, Scripture), that is exactly where we find ourselves, right now.”
Other than Aristotle’s (and Nietzsche’s) “eternal recurrence of the same,” there is no such thing as a merely secular eschatology.
That is all.
“The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.” — Dr. Cornel West.
Depending on how seriously one wants to take this claim, it could be taken as an example of the veracity of philosophical historicism, that truth (or being) gives itself in and through time.
How so?
From a Christian perspective suffering is the result of what theologians call “the fall of humanity.” Were it not for the fall, there would be no suffering. But the fall is a temporal development, some kind of event (regardless of how “literally” one wants to take it) which takes place in and through time.
To put it as tersely as possible: no fall, no suffering; no suffering, no truth.
The fall leads to suffering, and the acknowledgment of suffering is a necessary condition for truth (in our fallen world).
That such philosophical historicism presupposes a premise of theology (which itself relies on revelation, or that which exceeds what unaided natural reason can discover) should not worry us: such is the case for all legitimate philosophical historicism.
“How could God have created light on the first day, when the sun was not created until the fourth day?” (I wonder who the first critical, early modern philosopher was to scornfully ask this question.) Finally, I have an answer to this question that is satisfying, thanks to the first section of the fifth “collation” of St. Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaëmeron.
The answer is that the light God created on the first day was intellectual light, not visual light (or any kind of physical light on any spectrum). Intellectual light, that is, which is the condition of possibility for the understanding of objects in the world (metaphysics), for the understanding the meaning of linguistic statements (logic or “interpretation”), for the understanding the propriety of “right behavior” (morality or ethics).
So thinks Bonaventure, anyway, much in line with an approach to the six days of creation initiated by St. Augustine.
OK, but here’s my lingering questions. If this light was the condition of the possibility for the understanding objects, would not there have needed to be objects for the understanding to grasp? Yes, and indeed there was: the prime matter which we read about in Gen 1:2, and which, according to Aristotle, in characterized by spatial extension. Would not there, in the same vein, have needed to be linguistic (lôgikôs) expressions in order for the understanding to comprehend? Yes, and indeed there was: first, “in the beginning was the Logos” (John 1), and second, it is God’s speech which brought the light into being in the first place: God’s speech precedes the light. Same for good behavior: not only has the Trinity (and the proprietary activity contained therein) already existed for all eternity, but the very activity of God’s creation is the standard for propriety, if ever there was one.
OK, but what about an understanding? Should there not have been an understanding already in place, before God created the condition of the possibility of its ability to function? No: there is nothing troubling about the view that God created the ability to understand before the actual factulty of the understanding. (In fact, this view lends credence to the stance of divine illumination theory, which insists that for a knower to know an object, a third thing must be in place: light.)
Of course this answer will not satisfy the biased demands of the modern skeptic, who rejects out of hand the existence of the transcendent or supernatural, and who thus rejects the notion of intellectual light.
According to Rowan Williams, Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky taught that “the Holy Spirit is that which you see shining in the faces of the saints.”
Seeing the Holy Spirit. Hmmm….
As I find myself asking, “Nice, but can you really see it (the Holy Spirit)?” it occurs to me that this question epitomizes what, for me, philosophy is all about.
Because, for me, the question, “Can I see the Holy Spirit in the faces of the saints?” or “Can I see the Body of Christ in the consecrated host at the altar in Holy Communion?” is structurally similar (identical?) to the question, “Can I see a cup in a bit of porcelain matter?” or “Can I see a wave within a blob of aquatic matter?”
I am a member of that school of thought, following Aristotle (and Plato), which thinks that, in order to recognize any object whatsoever which I see in front of me, I must first have logos. I must first have a concept of “Holy Spirit” or “Body of Christ” or “cup” or “wave.” What I “see” (recognize) is pre-informed by what I know or think.
Otherwise, the world, in the words of William James, is a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” (Which is not far from what Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer before him, thought.)
Without logos, there is no such thing as object.
But where does this “logos,” this concept, this “secret knowledge” … where does it come from? Imagined in the Christian neoplatonist tradition as divine illumination, this is the real and beautiful mystery.
So, you see, it is tough (at least for us moderns) to be confident that you see the Holy Spirit in the faces of the saints, admittedly. But it is also tough (at least for us moderns) to believe that you see a cup in a hunk of porcelain. And when you realize that, it becomes easier, more plausible, to be confident in seeing the Holy Spirit, or the Body of Christ.
Thanks be to God that the logos became matter.
As I continue to press on in my dissertation research, investigating Joseph Ratzinger’s The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (the English translation of a major section of his Habilitationschrift, or “second dissertation”), one important issue I’m attending to is how he thinks about tradition. This is because, like history itself (as well as eschatology), tradition is a phenomenon constituted by time.
In his memoirs entitled Milestones (first published in Italian in 1997), the then future Pontiff writes that during his theological studies at Munich (prior to his doctorate),
‘Tradition’ was what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Würzburg … had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the fifth century; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to ‘apostolic tradition.’ And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared. This argument is compelling if you understand ‘tradition’ strictly as the handing down of fixed formulas and texts. This was the position that our teachers represented. But if you conceive of ‘tradition’ as the living process by which the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could not grasp (cf. John 16:12-13), then subsequent ‘remembering’ (cf. John 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it had not caught sight of previously and yet was already handed down in the original Word. But such a perspective was still quite unattainable by German theological thought.
The conception of tradition which Ratzinger here articulates is quite compatible with his presentation of St. Bonaventure’s logos of history as he (Ratzinger) articulates it in his Habilitationschrift. In that work Ratzinger’s Bonaventure parts company in significant ways with the eschatologically innovative Joachim of Fiori, yet all the while giving the Calabrian monk a qualified “high five” with respect to his provocative vision of a future: a kind of democratized sapientia nulliformis, a community of wise humans who peacefully enjoy an unmediated vision of God.
My claim here is that Ratzinger’s conception of tradition as an open “remembering” of content previously unacknowledged is a necessary condition for his endorsement of Bonaventure’s innovative Joachimite eschatology.
As anyone who has read Plato’s Apology knows, at one point during his trial Socrates argues that it is irrational to fear death, because no-one really knows what happens to one after death.
This has never made sense to me. “But,” I’ve always mentally protested in response to Socrates’ point, “surely this ignorance is not a reason not to fear death. After all, if anything is worthy of fear, is not a prime candidate for such fear precisely the unknown?”
I still think that my objection is valid. However, I have had some leisure today to focus a bit more deeply on this issue, and it now seems to me that Socrates does have a good point.
What he is actually doing, one could argue, is clarifying the precise kind of fear it is rational to have in the face of death: not fear of “burning in hell” or whatever the ancient equivalent to that is (since we lack knowledge about this), but rather, precisely, fear of the unknown.
Fear of the unknown, that is, is quite different in character than fear of something like pain or eternal suffering. Likewise, it calls for different therapies or remedies. One such remedy was explored 2500 years after Socrates himself died: that of Heidegger.
“We are all part of a movement to put first things recognizably first. This movement is about heals over head. It is far easier for [an organization] to compile of menu of services … than it is to create a community of tenderness, a community so loving and so welcoming that everyone feels like they are wearing a parachute. A place, a geography, where we all decide to make a decision to live in each others’ hearts.”—Father Greg Boyle, Founder & Director, Homeboy Industries.
I’ve heard plenty of speeches in my day, but the words above constitute what is for me perhaps the most moving “oratory experience” I’ve ever had.
This speech was the culmination, or the final plenary event, of a two-day conference at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles which I had the honor and joy of attending this past week, together with two dear friends, D.G. Montalvo and David Dickerson. We were attending this event at the invitation of the Episcopal Health Foundation of the Diocese of Texas, in hopes that it would benefit us here at Christ Church as we partner with the E.H.F. in hopes of increasing the holistic peace and justice of our community.
Allow me to unpack the most salient phrases in the snippet above. First, “recognizably first.” When Fr. Greg uttered these words, it “cut me to the quick.” In other words, I became deeply convicted of the need, not just to state that justice is a priority for us at Christ Church (including Christ Church South), but to make that priority recognizable, visible, clear. It must be obvious to anyone who visits us on Sunday morning that we are a community where Christ binds us together: not class, not race, not affinity.
Second, “heals over head.” I could talk about this one for hours. A huge part of my “spiritual / intellectual biography” is the issue of “reason vs. desire”: which is privileged? For Aristotle it is reason’s job to discipline the human being’s passions and desires. And yet, Christian Neoplatonism responds (I’m painting with insanely broad brush strokes here) by pointing to a “higher” kind of desire which, in turn, woos, summons, and directs reason itself. Father Greg is clearly one who affirms the priority of desire / feeling / passion over reason. Hence, “heals over head.” In the same vein he stresses that “a community tenderness is harder [and more important] than a menu of services.” In other words, for Fr. Greg, nothing can be more important than love (which, after all, is a kind of desire). Nothing can be more important than relationship, intimacy, “living in each others’ hearts.” This is the foundation of Homeboy. Good thing, too, since this is also the foundation of the Kingdom of God.
Last phrase to unpack: “parachutes [instead of backpacks].” Father Greg’s goal is to make the “homies” among whom he lives and works feel like they are wearing parachutes, and not backpacks. At first I was not sure what he meant by this. It was either David or DG who helped me “get it.” A parachute softens one’s landing; a burdensome backpack, in contrast, only weighs one down all the more. The goal here is to facilitate a soft landing, for any homie who is falling to the ground. Soft landings, instead of crashing & burning.
How is this facility accomplished? Only by a community which puts first things recognizably first. Only by a community in which the members truly live in each others’ hearts. Only by a community of tenderness which privileges healing over headiness, and gives people parachutes and not heavy burdens of condemnation.
“So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history.” — David Bentley Hart, _The Reason for God_, 293.
So true. This is what I am constantly trying to get my undergraduate students to see. Before they can even be open to theology and religion (Christian or otherwise), they first must question their “ordinary” modes modes of understanding. They must first become skeptics. They must first become nihilists.
This is why Socrates was such a gadly, attempting to “corrupt the youth,” to get the young, future politicians of Athens to question authority, to question their assumptions, to question to the status quo.
This is why John Milbank says that “theology is a hair’s breadth from nihilism.”
This (slightly embarrassing) article is inspired by section II of David Bentley Hart’s chapter entitled “Being (Sat)” in his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. It is intended for philosophy and theology geeks alone.
In his book Metaphysics: the Invention of Hierarchy, Adrian Pabst lays blame at the feet of several late medieval thinkers (chief among them Gilbert of Porreta) for departing from traditional metaphysical thought with their suggestion that possibility is prior to actuality. According to Pabst’s narration, this move is part and parcel with detaching the existence of things in the world from the existence of God, and the essence of things from the existence of those same things.
In an attempt to keep this blog post as pithy as possible, let me just say that one reason it is difficult for us moderns to “wrap our heads” around the massive historical import of this move of Gilbert’s is that the assumptions behind it have become as “natural” to us as the air that we breathe. That is, the priority of possibility has attained in our culture the status of unquestionable ideology. After all, take the example of a unicorn. It seems as obvious as the nose on your face to assume that, of course, we can speak of a unicorn without needing to affirm its existence. Here is a clear example, it is easy to assume, of the priority of possibility over actuality, of essence over existence.
And for a season in my intellectual pilgrimage, this issue of unicorns presented real and difficult problems for me, so much so that for a while I wanted to argue that unicorns must actually exist somehow; otherwise we’d not be talking about them. I felt that this position was required in order to maintain the priority of actuality over possibility.
Alas, however, no such positing is necessary, and I have since come to agree with what Thomas Aquinas would say: we have no reason to think that unicorns actually exist because no one has ever actually seen one.
Well, one might argue, if they don’t exist, but we can still talk about them, then does this not suggest the priority of possibility over actuality, of essence over existence?
And the answer (in my opinion) is: not at all. All of our talk of unicorns manifestly does presuppose the actuality of … something. Not of unicorns, granted. But has anyone ever spoken of a unicorn while not relying on the notion of a horse? A horse, mind you, which actually does exist.
And not just a horse. No one, further, has ever spoken of a unicorn without, well, without speaking. That is, without depending on the actual existence of those human artifacts called words (or, as Derrida calls them, graphemes and phonemes). Again, graphemes and phonemes that actually exist, and which must be interacted with for any thought about unicorns (or anything else at all) to occur.
Unicorns, then, don’t exist. Thanks to the work of the human (productive) imagination, we can still talk about them … but not without relying on a whole host of real things which, unlike unicorns, actually do exist.
Essence, then, is seen to require existence, and actuality is (for now, at least) still required for anything at all to be possible.
This little essay, a practice exercise for my upcoming PhD comprehensive exams, is intended for philosophy & theology geeks, and for them alone!
For at least four decades now, one strain or type of “postmodern” theologian (such as Jack Caputo) has been arguing, following Martin Heidegger, that any purported conception of God, but especially any used by the (western) metaphysical tradition, is inherently idolatrous. In this regard, Caputo is also channeling the spirit of his friend Jacques Derrida (d. 2004), insofar as both the Gentile Catholic Caputo and the Jewish Derrida root their critiques in an allegedly biblical “idoloclasm.”
As I see it, there are three valid responses to this criticism, which show that our intellectual conceptions of God are not necessarily idolatrous.
- First one can argue that the best renditions of philosophico-theological accounts of God proceed on the basis of a kind of Pseudo-Dionysian apophaticism. That is, when thinkers from Augustine to Thomas (and one could possibly throw Aristotle into this list, albeit anachronistically, perhaps) develop their accounts of God in a philosophical or theological register, they are essentially saying what God is not. They are making denials about God. For example, with regard to the Aristotelian (and neoplatonist) point that God is “pure act,” one could argue that this is really another way of saying that God does not at all admit of any kind of potentiality, including and especially the potentiality of materiality.
- Second one could appeal to biblical revelation, which does two relevant things. First, it claims that God is being or “has” being (Exodus 3:15, inter alia), a claim which then gives license to the interpreter to imagine God, to describe God, to think God (conceptually). Second, though, Scripture itself develops multiple images of God which no one, not even the most hard core iconoclast, has regarded as idolatrous. Examples: God as a pillar of fire in the Old Testament; God as a dove descending on Jesus in the New Testament. I suppose one could even place Christ himself in this context: the incarnation establishes a new economy of images.
- Third one can appeal Thomas Aquinas’ the logic of divine naming, which he includes in his “Five Ways” in Summa Theologiae (prima pars, Question II). On this view, God’s naming works such that even terms or concepts such as “first mover” or “first cause” do actually refer to God. This position is ably represented by Denis Turner, for example here. (That Thomas thinks this, it seems to me, indicates something inscrutably profound about his thinking about God. Somehow, God is accessible both to natural human reason and to divinely bequeathed faith.)
In conclusion, however, one should also respond to this Derridian / Heideggerian point with salutary gratitude. Idolatry, for anyone purporting to stand within a biblical or theological tradition, is a real thing, and a pernicious problem. One must repent; one must be on guard. And yet, on the basis of the three responses above, I think we can legitimately disagree with Caputo / Derrida / Heidegger.
This article, an exercise in my preparation for PhD comprehensive exams, is intended for philosophy and theology geeks, and them alone.
How does the meaning of the term “metaphysics” change from the premodern to the modern period?
As good a place as any to begin is Book VIII chapter 6 of Augustine’s City of God, where Augustine rehearses:
- The priority of simple being over all non-simple being.
- Because (unlike body and soul) simple being is beyond degree(s of comparison), it is that by which any apprehension of beauty is judged. Hence simple being must be a or the “primary form” that exists in the mind.
Two quick notes about this summary rendition of things. First, Augustine here builds upon Aristotle’s work of prôtê philosophia (subsequently named The Metaphysics) which conceives of the unmoved mover (which, as “that which is most knowable in itself,” is the ultimate pedagogical destination of Aristotle’s entire programmic “order of learning” or hierarchy of sciences, beginning with the Organon) as pure, fully “actualized” being, pure energeia. No matter, no potency at all can be said to be in God. Hence, for the Stagirite theos is utterly simple (haplax). Second, it is instructive, as we juxtapose this way of thinking with modern thought, to remember Avicenna’s determination of simple being as necessary, and complex being as contingent. Although not all pre-modern thinkers—Plotinus and Averroes come to mind—agree with this characterization, it is still conveniently helpful to regard all material, spatio-temporal being as contingent, for the pre-modern mind.
Enter Descartes, who changes things at the most fundamental level possible. The short version of things is that metaphysics is now cast in terms of res cogitans and res extensa. But that dichotomy lies at the far end of a series of moves which change the course of intellectual history precisely in their details.
Those crucial “details” begin with a move which I will characterize as: grounding the sciences in the irreducibility of the individual subject. Descartes agrees with Aristotle on the importance of “that which is most known or knowable[*] in itself,” but for Descartes, who thinks he’s doubted everything that can be, can no longer regard this “thing” to be God. Further, it is still for him—as also for Aristotle—this recursivity or reflexivity which alone can ground scientia. What, then, is the locus of this reflexivity? No longer nous noeôs, it is now: subject and object. The latter grounds the former and the former grounds the world.
No longer, then, is science—as was the case from Aristotle through the Scholastics—an ordered system of intellectual disciplines, each of which depends upon the former epistemologically (or pedagogically), and upon the subsequent ontologically. Now, with the birth of the modern, they are considered to be (grounded in) a reflexive relationship between subject / observer and object / observed.
So, if “metaphysics” refers to that which is beyond the natural (which, for Descartes is collapsed with culture, the domain of human poiêsis and technê), the that which is beyond is the human subject, res cogitans.
True, Descartes believes in God and math, but these things are arrived at and secured only after he convinces himself that the subject, the cogito, exists. Plus, while the subject is known for Descartes, God and math are for him likely objects of mere belief. (They are moments of his “way out,” back out into the world, subsequent to his “movement inward,” which hits “rock bottom” at the point at which he cannot doubt the existence of his self.)
Finally, it must be said that this metaphysical shift which we see in Descartes is not the end of a development, but only the beginning: thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Kant, Bergson and Husserl build on this foundation, in their various and unique ways. Just one example would be Husserl’s redefinition of “absolute being” (also for Bergson) and “dependent being.” According to Dermot Moran,
Husserl maintains that consciousness cannot be thought away in such an experiment and hence must be understood as having “absolute being” whereas reality has to be understood as dependent being. In this section [§49] Husserl styles the world of pure consciousness as “immanent being” and as absolute. (Dermot Moran, “Foreward,” in Edmund Husserl, Ideas (… ), xxiii.
[*] in Greek these two participles are morphologically identical.
What, for Plato, are the forms? Nothing could be more difficult than to answer this question: even Augustine, who certainly knew Plato much much better than I, dumurs in attempting to “nail” Plato “down:” after all, “he emulated … the well known practice of his master Socrates … of concealing his own knowledge of opinion.” (City of God VIII.4)
So, then, what follows is the best I can do in stammering toward some kind of sketchy impression of Plato’s doctrine of the forms.
Many interpreters of Plato, including Aristotle, who followed the truth over his friend, take Platonic forms to be mental concepts. And, one can see a certain plausibility in this interpretation, especially based on the early dialogues, such as the Euthyphro, where the form of “piousness” is considered in the context of a discussion on genus and species, and in the Phaedo, where equal sticks and stones are said to be equal, due to the reality of some form of equality. In the former case it can be said that genus and species are, in fact, mental concepts, and in the latter case one can say that mathematical type entities seem to be mental concepts, as well.
So, is this the answer? For Plato, are the forms simply mental concepts?
Not quite, for beginning in the middle dialogues, including the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus, the Good seems to be a mysterious reality, in which the human soul participates. This is construed in diverse ways, but in each case the Good is transcendent and elusive while nonetheless characterized as a kind of desiridatum for which the human mind strives. In the Republic one thinks of the Good which lies above the divided line, and hence above the rational intellect simply speaking. Since the entire logic of the divided line proceeds on the basis of participation (with the lower realm of appearances “participating” in the upper realm of rationality), it makes sense to see rational nous, or indeed the whole soul or the whole person, as participating, striving to participate, in the good, into which it is “wooed” or even seduced.
Speaking of seduction, in the Symposium we encounter divine Diotima, at whom the lover enjoys or delights in looking[1], Diotima here considered as the beloved. In addition to this, Diotima (according to Seth Bernardete in his commentary on the Symposium) completes Socrates’s life-long education, providing the third of his major breakthroughs or epiphanies (after the second sailing of the Phaedo and the Parmenidean realization, narrated in the first half of the Parmenides, that if the forms are knowable, they are knowable only by God), that all things participate in Beauty. On this scenario, the ultimate form is “Beauty” (there is room in Plato to argue that beauty is “convertible” with the Good), and all things participate in it, as illuminated reason is enabled to perceive.
Hence, a more plausible view, in opposition to form-as-mental-concept, is the view that Plato regards the Form(s) as participata, that in which all things—including the human mind—participate. For Plato, then, it is the Form(s) in which we live and move and have our being.
If ever there were an “extra-mental” reality, this is it.
[1] The Greek eidos is cognate with the verb for “to look,” also with the Latin video, whose first letter was originally a diagamma, yielding the Greek stem “id.”
Note: this article is intended for philosophy and theology nerds, and them alone!
I am suspecting that “the phenomenological reduction” is not possible when it comes to eating (an apple, or the consecrated Body of Christ, for example). It seems to work for vision, but not for eating. If I “bracket” the existence of the apple (while eating it), then am I not also led inextricably to “bracket” the existence of the tongue, teeth, throat, and stomach which touches them? They are “like objects,” after all. (Or something like that.)
Aristotle may have known this in advance, as evidenced by his words in _De Anima_ II.9-11. There he says that touch (which subsumes taste & smell, such that, ultimately, there are only 3 senses) “proves the existence of the soul” because for it alone among the senses is the “third thing” (required for sensation to work) the actual human body. (He is here assuming that since the body cannot be the thing which does the experiencing, the only option left is to say that the soul is the thing that does the experiencing.)
Which means that the body cannot be bracketed while eating, period. Which means that the apple cannot be bracketed. Which means that the phenomenological reduction does not work with respect to eating.
Which means objects exists.
No wonder Christians (as opposed to Greeks, who privilege vision, & Jews, who privilege hearing) privilege eating (and hence touch).
Grateful to John Milbank & Catherine Pickstock for their emphasis on the sensation of touch (in their book on Thomas Aquinas, Truth In Aquinas).
Note: this post is intended only for philosophy & theology geeks!
In her chapter, “Introduction to the Phaedo,” Eva Brann helpfully illuminates what is going on in Plato’s “second sailing,” discussed in the Socratic dialogue of the same name. Just before Socrates shares his discovery of the second sailing with his interlocutors in the Phaedo, he pauses dramatically and reflects deeply within himself. Indeed, he seems to be signaling, what is at stake in this second sailing is “no trivial business:” he means to inquire into the very “cause of generation and destruction as a whole.”[1]
Socrates then proceeds to narrate an intellectual autobiography of sorts, emphasizing the unfruitfulness of his prior “inquiry into nature.” At first, he says, he would “give the most ordinary answers to explain generation and growth: a human being grows by eating and drinking and adding flesh.” Note that this explanation is merely physical, merely based on a kind of naïve visual observation with little attempt to inquire “behind” the surface level items of everyday experience. This is an “explanation” that functions at the level of “things bumping into each other,” the naïve, “physicalist” kind of explanation offered by the Presocratics of the Milesian School.
Brann continues to comment upon Socrates’ account of his intellectual development in the Phaedo by pointing out the importance of the young Plato’s self-narrated discovery of a claim put forward by Anaxagoras, that “Mind orders the world.” Despite the fact that Anaxagoras failed to apply this principle rigorously to his system, instead falling back upon the same superficial explanations of ancient physicalists such as Thales, this insight about mind would prove determinative for the young Socrates, according to his own account. For it was this inkling that allowed Socrates to move beyond merely physical explanations. His recourse? If one wise statement from a predecessor in the tradition—that is, if just one logos—could prove fruitful, why not search for others as well?
Socrates describes this “moving beyond” in terms of a “turning away,” a forsaking his prior method of “direct” naïve observation for what he calls a “second sailing.” A fresh attempt to regroup, to start over, to turn away (albeit provisionally) from what the eyes see, to an investigation of what speech has in common with what those eyes see.[2] After all, one thing that eyes can never see is the very thing that Socrates initially stated as his goal: “the cause of generation and destruction as a whole,” whatever that might turn out to be.
How similar is this move to the procedure(s) which, twenty-four and centuries later, Edmund Husserl advocates under the banner of “phenomenology?” The short answer: very similar, indeed … but more different than similar.
To see resemblance, however, one must first appreciate that the procedure which Socrates enacts in his “second sailing” is actually composed of two, smaller-scale moves: first, he turns away; then he searches for something by means of words, by means of logoi.
What is fascinating is that, Husserl’s phenomenological procedure, has advocated and spelled out in his Ideas I, also involves not one fundamental move, but two.
And as is the case with Plato, the first move is a kind of turning away. Husserl writes:
We put out of action the … natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever includes respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually “there for us”….[3]
How similar is this move to (the first moment of) Socrates’ move? From the quotation immediately above (together with its context) we know that Husserl’s move involves a turning away from a certain kind of naïve, “natural” assumption: that the things which we see “really” exist. But what is Socrates turning away from?
I decided that I must be careful not to suffer the misfortune which happens to people who look at the sun and watch it during an eclipse. For some of them ruin their eyes unless they look at its image in water or something of the sort. I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to conceptions and examine in them the truth of realities.[4]
Now, from this quotation we see that what both Plato and Husserl turn away from is a kind of naïve trust which assumes that things are in reality the way they appear to us by way of our vision. In this regard, it seems to me that Plato & Husserl are, in their “turn away,” doing the same thing.
Further, in a kind of intermediate move—a move between the moves—Socrates follows Husserl in emphasizing the importance of images, images which both thinkers affirm and advocate as an object of our focus. Plato seems to endorse the consideration of “image[s] in the water; in Husserl’s phenomenological reduction / ephochê he thinks that “a new region of being,” that of consciousness, comes into view, and within this region the mind attends rigorously not just to memories but also to “fantasies,” that is to say, to images.
Let me quickly register one pointed difference, however, in the two “turnings away.” Husserl makes it explicit in Ideas Part I, §32 that in the phenomenological reduction, one turns away not just from a kind of naïve dependence upon what one perceives by way of vision, but also from any kind of “theory” about the world or the things in the world. The world which we acknowledge, if only for the purpose of “setting in brackets,” is a world “free from all theory.”[5] So what one does here is to suspend the existence of the world, a process which includes provisionally denying or ignoring any kind of metaphysical scientific claim. The rejected world is “just the world as my senses take it in.” It is this world which is provisionally suspended, or assumed not to exist.
Now, one the one hand, Socrates can be said to turn away from this same world of appearance, and to suspend, reject, ignore, deny the theories of the world which he had previously been assuming. So far, Plato’s move matches Husserl’s. However, one must also recognize that Plato’s rejection of theory quickly gives way to an new entertaining of them, in the form of logoi, or wise opinions passed down primarily from his predecessors in the tradition. Secondly, and more fundamental, Socrates does not say that he is suspending or doubting or turning away from “the existence” of anything at all. I’d argue, in fact, that it is impossible to regard Socrates as doing this. Such a move occurs only after Descartes in the tradition, since prior to him there is an “ontological assuredness” (Cornelius Castoriadis) which characterizes all premodern thinkers. For them the question is never “Does anything at all exist?” but only “how does reality exist?”.
The deepest point is this, it seems to me: that from which Socrates turns away is merely one theory of how things exist. Granted, it was the theory which he apparently had adopted, but by his day many rival theories were on the scene (Parmenidean monism, Pythagoreanism, etc.). That from which Husserl turns away (albeit provisionally), however, runs much deeper than any one of these ancient, inter-mural theories, one among which Socrates repudiates. The “natural attitude” seems to be universally assumed. Even Buddhist mystics and ancient Cynics assume the world to exist in the sense in which Husserl means. And yet, this is what Husserl calls into question.
Put it another way: Plato seeks “to inquire into the cause of generation and destruction as a whole;” he never calls that cause–which surely is (closely related to) being–into question. But this calling into question is the very thing that Husserl’s phenomenological epochê does do.
To conclude. In this sloppily-written short essay, I’ve noted some similarities & differences between Plato’s “second sailing” and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. Let me state what, perhaps, is the most interesting similarity between the two moves: they both “pause and reflect deeply” within themselves. What Plato states briefly, though, and passes over quickly, Husserl, like his contemporary Henri Bergson, “stays with” and elongates. For these latter two phenomenologists, then, this move deep within turns out to be a much bigger deal.
[1] Eva Brann, “Introduction to the Phaedo,” in The Music of the Republic (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011), 20.
2 Brann, “Introduction,” 22.
[3] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 59 (Part I, §32).
[4] Plato, Phaedo, 99d-e, from the Perseus Digital Library, URL = http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DPhaedo%3Asection%3D99e
[5] Husserl, Ideas, 60.
What is the relationship between philosophy and theology? In a very real sense, the burning desire to answer this question for myself was one of my primary motivations for entering a PhD program in philosophy at a Catholic institution, studying under a renowned thinker who, sometimes I am tempted to think, is a theologian posing as a philosopher. To my mind such an academic posture is perfectly suited for our contemporary cultural moment in the West.
However before one can answer this question, one must first be as clear as possible on the meaning of the terms “philosophy” and “theology.” Here’s my stab at such requisite clarity. Theology is the rational interpretation and development of the content of revelation; philosophy is the ordered system of sciences, in both its Aristotelian and Hegelian incarnations, extending from the supreme principle of theos / Geist on the one hand, to the most propaeduetically incipient or elementary principle(s) of logic on the other. (Note: God / theos / Geist is a constitutent element for both ancient thought [Aristotle] and (post)modern thought [Hegel].)
In the third part of his “system” entitled “The Philosophy of Geist,” Hegel writes:
In order to elucidate for ordinary thinking this unity of form and content present in the mind, the unity of manifestation and what is manifested, we can refer to the teaching of the Christian religion. Christianity says: God has revealed himself through Christ, his only begotten son. Ordinary thinking straightway interprets this statement to mean that Christ is only [ital. mine] the organ of this revelation, as if what is revealed in this manner were something other than the source of the revelation. But in truth this statement properly means that God has revealed that his nature consists in having a Son, i.e., in making a distinction within himself, making himself finite, but in his difference remaining in communion with himself, beholding and revealing himself in the Son, and that by this unity with the Son, by his being for himself in the other, he is absolute mind or spirit, so that the Son is not the mere organ of the revelation, but is himself the content of the revelation. (Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit, tr. Wallace & Miller, 1971, §383)
Preliminary construal of the relationship between philosophy and theology (as defined above and to be developed later): they are symbiotically or reflexively related, such that each is the condition of possibility for the other.
That is, there neither is nor can be philosophy without theology, nor theology without philosophy.
(Note: this view, it seems to me right now, requires that we regard Aristotle as a recipient of revelation. Kinda crazy.)
On page 129 on of After Virtue (2nd ed.) MacIntyre writes:
Here again it is clear that Nietzsche had to mythologize the distant past in order to sustain his vision. What Nietzsche portrays is aristocratic self-assertion; what Homer [portrays are] the forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one. Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own nineteenth-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical inquiry was actually an inventive literary construction.
Good point. This does not necessary invalidate Nietzsche’s project, but it demands that here (as also with Heidegger on Aristotle) one be clear on the artistic nature of it.
Nerd alert: this post is intended for theology geeks only!
In so many ways I’m grateful for the education I received in my MDiv program at Westminster Theological Seminary. However, one qualm I have: WTS’ consistent presumption of a-historicity. That is, it tends to deny that its primary doctrinal emphases (most of which I am totally “down with”) are rooted in a particular history.
Case in point. In the biblical departments there was much (extremely valuable) emphasis on biblical typology.
For decades I’ve wondered, “Does this idea have any historical precedence in medieval thought?” Now I know that it does:
All the mysteries of Scripture treat of Christ with his Body…. This is the meaning of Augustine in his book on the City of God.
So writes Bonaventure in Hexaemeron XV,[1] thus indicating that for him, Augustine’s primary mode of exegesis is an example of a figura sacramental, and not of the allegorical or spiritual sense of Scripture (that is, the “four-fold sense”).
Basically Augustine is doing typological exegesis, and not “spiritual” exegesis, according to Bonaventure. Hence, we can say that Westminster’s emphasis on biblical typology almost certainly has a historical dependence on Augustine. The fact that at least one medieval author (Bonaventure) explicitly acknowledges Augustine as exegeting in a non-“allegorical” way makes this clear.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History of St. Bonaventure, tr. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), 10.
What follows is adapted from an email I sent to a friend, who asked a question
about whether God is angry.
Dear Beth (not my friend’s real name),
Sorry for the delayed response!
You wrote:
“Does God’s goodness require an emotive anger toward his enemies?
We at least see an active anger, right? I think I’m following your argument regarding “being” as incompatable with anger.
Some might argue that anger is a product of anxiety. And God is Not anxious or anxiety itself.”
I am going to answer your questions in a very tight, stodgy, crusty, cold, dry way, rooted in medieval metaphysics (of the Thomistic sort), but I think this is a very helpful approach, b/c “shocks” us out of our modern, secular, western, individualistic assumptions, particularly our assumptions about God.
In other words, I am convinced that we need to hear about how ancient & medieval Christians thought about God, partly b/c it reminds us that our thinking is so often too small, too constricted, too much like the capitalist, technocratic, managerial world we live in.
So here we go.
As you yourself indicate in your question, you are asking a question about emotion, specifically about whether God has emotion(s), including the emotion of anger.
Guess where our English word “emotion” comes from? It comes from the Latin, ex-motus. (The “x” drops out b/c the Romans did not like certain kinds of consonants between vowels.) Ex-motus: a motion away, or a movement out of. At any rate, emotions are a kind of motion. And motion is a kind of change, specifically change in location. (I’m simplifying a bit, but, still, I think I’m speaking accurately for the purposes of this conversation.)
Now, for someone like Thomas Aquinas (and the vast majority of the tradition, including Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Hooker, de Luback & Balthassar would agree with him), it is very important to realize that God does not change. In my opinion this position is also utterly biblical.
Here is where it gets kind of dense, and difficult for us to wrap our minds around.
The reason God does not admit of any change or motion has to do with what change and motion are–they presuppose and “rely upon” time. And time, whatever it is, is a created thing. Hence, if God experiences or undergoes emotion, then God is a temporal being.
Plus, if you say that God changes, then (to the pre-modern mind) this implies a state in God which is less than perfect. And this is something we want to avoid thinking of or believing. The reason an acorn changes into an oak tree (so Aristotle, upon whom Thomas relies, would say) is that it lack perfection. Once it achieves its status as an oak tree, however, then it becomes “perfect” (or at least more perfect), b/c it has now achieved its God-given purpose, packed into nature, to become an oak tree.
Similarly, if you say that an elderly person’s muscles have atrophied–and this is a kind of change or motion opposite that of the oak tree, a kind of “devolution” away from “perfection”–then you imply that the person is “not perfect” in the opposite way of the acorn. You might say that that the acorn is “pre-perfection,” whereas the old person’s muscles are “post-perfection.” In both cases, the reality of change implies a lack of “perfection” in time. But this is not applicable to God: he is never “less than perfect” in this way.
(Note: the Greek word for “perfect” is teleotos, or something like that. This word is cognate with the word telos, which means, end or purpose, as in “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” My point here is that, when modern ppl like you & me think about “perfection,” we bring lots of assumptions which the pre-moderns did not share. For example, when I say “perfect” in the paragraph above, I am not implying anything like John Wesley’s supposed idea of “sinless perfection,” a state of sinlessness in man. That is not what we are talking about. Rather, we are talking about a state in which a being is “living into,” or achieving, its purpose. This is what the ancients & medeivals thought of as perfection.)
So … that is my attempt to show that God does not have emotion(s). Hope it makes sense.
Now, having said all of that, I do agree that the holiness of God requires that, since man has sinned and the fall has happened and there is evil and injustice, etc., in the world, God is absolutely in opposition to all of that. This is one reason (not the only reason) why the Bible (and the liturgy) speaks of the wrath of God. That is true. However, a) There must be some sense in which God does not have enemies: every creature that was made was made by him! b) This “wrath” cannot be essential to God. It is not true of God, in himself, or from all eternity, or apart from the creation of the world.
One last thought. I’d argue that this way of seeing God is “beyond emotion” is what allows us to resist the temptation to make God in our own image, kind of a sentimental God. Banish that thought!
Also, this way of thinking allows us to see human emotion as a participation in something “bigger and greater” in God. Our emotions, joy, sadness, etc., are not the same thing as what happens in God, but they are analogous participations in the Triune Life of Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Example: our experiences of pain are a faint, dim intimation of what the Father must “feel like” when the Son moves away from him in the Perichoretic Dance.
Perichoresis (from Greek: περιχώρησις perikhōrēsis, “rotation”) is a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to one another. Circumincession (later circuminsession) is a Latin-derived term for the same concept. – wikipedia
Creation is “theomorphic” or God-shaped, but God is not anthropmorphic. We do not make God or conceive of God in our own image.
That’s it. God bless you today!
Peace,
Matt+
PS Yes, if we say that “God is anxious,” we must say that “God is anxiety himself,” which follows from the doctrine of divine simplicity. (The bulk of my email above is related to divine simplicity, but I’m attempting there to “break it down” a bit more for you.)
PSS Here’s a blog post about the term “emotivism” as well as emotion in general.
In a previous post, I wrote:
Thomas, in question 3 of the Summa, adumbrates the simplicity of God: that God’s existence is his essence, and that God has no (non-metaphorical) predicate that is not also his essence. If we can say “God is good,” for example, then it is necessarily true that God is goodness. So also for “one,” “beautiful,” “real,” etc.
Now given the doctrine of divine simplicity, the same move can be made with respect to anger. That is, if God is angry, then it necessarily follows that God is anger itself.
From here it follows that if God is not anger itself, then it is not the case that God is angry.
Now I’ve never known of a theologian willing to claim that God is anger itself. And there are many reasons for this, not least that this would “reify” or “hypostasize” anger, giving it an ultimate, uncreated ontological status completely independent of the Fall (of man & angels).
But do you see what’s going on? Since we know that it is not the case that God is anger itself, it necessarily follows that God is not angry.
Does Scripture (and the liturgy) speak of “the wrath of God?” Yes, it does. However, it is important to keep that strain of thought in its proper (marginal) place. It is true only in a distant and radically derivative sense. (I need to think more about this.)
One last note: notice that all of this presupposes the simplicity of God. In other words, it assumes the classical doctrine about God that, in particular, he is in no way subject to temporality (pace the likes of that “open theist” Greg Boyd and that “process theologian” Alfred North Whitehead and all their respective followers), which is wholly and completely a created thing. Otherwise, this line of thinking, which demonstrates that God is not angry, fails.
Geek alert: only theology & philosophy nerds should read this post. (It is a distillation of one swath of my study project for comprehensive exams.)
In Question 11 of the Prima Pars of Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, he treats the question of the unity of God.
In this particular section of his “Treatise on God” (usually considered to be questions 2 – 26 of the Prima Pars), he makes statements which, “by good and necessary inference” allow the reader to conclude that God is not numerically one.
But to see this, one must first take a quick plunge into the way that the ancients thought about number, for upon this way of thinking, Thomas is wholly dependent.
Two quick points to make here: 1. that “one” is convertible with being; 2. that “the numerical one” is different from “the one that is convertible with being.”
First, that oneness is convertible with being. Thomas, in question 3 of the Summa, adumbrates the simplicity of God: that God’s existence is his essence, and that God has no (non-metaphorical) predicate that is not also his essence. If we can say “God is good,” for example, then it is necessarily true that God is goodness. So also for “one,” “beautiful,” “real,” etc. [By the way, an interesting corollary of this doctrine is that we can be sure that, in a meaningful sense, God is not angry. See this post.]
Because God is simple in this way, it is impossible that he exists “through another,” which is the medieval (and ancient) way of saying that he is uncaused. But if he is uncaused, then must be necessary. Right: God does not exist contingently, like material beings, but rather necessarily. (Note: Averroes believed that a) material beings, i.e., the celestial bodies, exist necessarily; b) that effects, like Plotinus’ Nous and the heavenly bodies, can exist necessarily. Thomas disagrees with him, agreeing with Avicenna that spatial extension is convertible with contingency.)
All of this means that God is what you might call “full being.” Or “Being itself.” Or “Being as Such” (as long as, by that last denomination, you don’t mean “Being in General:” shame on you, Francisco Suarez).
Now, if you like Thomas Aquinas then you also have to like Parmenides (at least in a qualified way). Thomas, like Plato & Aristotle before him, gives Parmenides a qualified “high five” for his insight that being must be one. If two things exist (Aristotle & Thomas would say, “… exist in the full and proper sense”), that is, then this necessarily implies “privation,” or what Parmenides calls “non-being” (if for no other reason than that “A” is not “B.”).
But … what do we (or does Parmenides) mean here by “one?” Thomas think, in Article 1 of Question 11, that he means “undividability.” That is, the one thing that exists cannot be “sliced and diced” such that you can chop A in half and get two A’s, two of the same thing. This is how being must needs be for Parmenides: undividible.
One more point. In this article Thomas also teaches (following Avicenna) that this kind of oneness is different from numerical oneness. The latter, he thinks, would imply an actual numeric infinity (off limits for him), and would “add something” to God in the same way that white “adds something” to the substance of Socrates.
Hence, for Thomas (and for me) God is one, but God is not numerically one.
Geek alert: this post is intended only for theology / philosophy nerds!
I have various motives for blogging; any particular blog post might be motivated by any number of things. Sometimes, as in the current case, I am motivated to blog by the urgent need to remember something, especially in its details and with textual evidence. The need to remember it, and the desire to discuss it with others, partly in order to remember it.
I turn my attention to the issue of the eternity (or the infinite temporal duration) of the world, an urgent issue in the medieval context of thought–the very phase of the history of philosophy in which my comps study partner and I are engaged–because of the intersection in this period between religions (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) on the one hand, and the (re)discovery of Aristotle on the other.
Clearly, as attested in _De Caelo_ II.1, Aristotle believed in the infinite temporal duration of the cosmos (both past and future), in particular of the heavenly bodies and their circular motion.
How do the religious thinkers of the medieval period respond to this philosophical position, presumably held to be based on reason alone? I will focus only on two: Averroes and Aquinas.
Averroes’ position is that, since philosophy trumps other modes of knowledge (namely, religion / “dialectic” and rhetoric / poetry), it is true, based on demonstrative knowledge, that the universe has always existed. (In fact in his _Incoherence of the Incoherence_ he argues that the matter of the celestial bodies is co-eternal with God, and that infinite temporal duration in the past is amenable to reason due to the circular nature of the celestial motion which it measures or with which it is coextensive: for Averroes nothing is pernicious about an infinite regress as long as it is “circular,” as long as it contains elements in the “chain” which precede and follow themselves.)
As Marquette philosopher Richard Taylor explains in this podcast, Averroes does not quite hold to the “double truth” theory that used to be the accusation leveled against 13th century members of the University of Paris Arts Faculty such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, but, still, he somehow manages to “affirm” both the eternality of the world and the Muslim version of the doctrine of the creation of the world, at “time zero.” He affirms the former as a philosopher and for philosophers, and the latter as a religious / legal scholar for religious folks and the people for whom he legislates.
Although, technically, this might not be a version of “double truth,” thanks be to God that this is not the approach which St. Thomas takes on this perennial issue. Rather, assuming (as he elsewhere argues) that we know some things by faith and other things by reason, he maintains that, although there is, based on reason alone, nothing irrational about Aristotle’s view, nevertheless it is an article of faith (or an object of faith), that the world as created by God has an absolute beginning in time, before which point it (along with everything else, including time) did not exist. (See Summa I.46.2.)
A few additional points about Thomas’ stance in all of this.
- Near the end of his “On the Eternality of the World,” Thomas does clarify that “nothing can be co-eternal with God, because nothing can be immutable save God alone,” thus indicating that, apparently on the basis of reason alone, the celestial bodies are not eternal. (Yes, apparent contradictions abound in such thorny issues.)
- This is also the context in which he clarifies that ex nihilo–as in, creatio ex nihilo–is simply a negation: “not created out of anything.”
- In the Summa Contra Gentiles II.37 he clarifies that “one could conceive of the universe as always existing yet totally dependent upon its creator: if the act of creating is inherently instantaneous, then there is no need that God temporally precede the universe to be its creator.” See David Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,”in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleanor Stump (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1193), 72-3.
- In the above context of the Summa Theologiae (I.46.2), Thomas is at pains to make it clear why we Christians must state plainly that the temporal beginning of the world is an “article of faith,” and not an object of reason:
And it is useful to consider this, lest anyone, presuming to demonstrate the what is of faith, should bring forward reasons that are not cogent, so as to give occasion to unbelievers to laugh, thinking that on such grounds we believe things that are of faith.
An admonition applicable to fundamentalists of all ages!
Geek alert: this essay will be of no interest to anyone other than philosophy & theology enthusiasts.
A decade ago I was infatuated by “critical theory.” These days, not so much. I’ve become much more straightforwardly orthodox, agreeing with Chesterton on “the romance of orthodoxy” (embodied, for example in his quip that “the act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice”).
Still, I remain convinced that one “critical” theorist necessary for understanding our cultural moment is Jacques Lacan. And though I don’t understand him (yet), I am trying. Which is why I am reading Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan, and how, in turn, I stumbled upon the following anecdote (which Zizek calls a “low-grade joke”) with which I want to begin this blog post:
[Once upon a time there was] a poor peasant who, having suffered a shipwreck, finds himself on an island, with, say, Cindy Crawford. After having sex with him, she asks how it was; his answer is, great, but he still has one small request to complete his satisfaction–could she dress herself up as his best friend, put on trousers and paint a moustache on her face? He reassures her that he is not a secret pervert, as she will see once she has granted the request. When she does, he approaches her, gives her a dig in the ribs, and tells her with the leer of male complicity: “You know what happened to me? I just had sex with Cindy Crawford!”
In the joke (the old-fashioned heterosexual promiscuity of which assuages my conscience, thus permitting me to include it in a publicly read blog post), the poor peasant has had an experience which he regards as profound, and which he must share; today I feel the same way.
My experience, however, unlike that of the peasant in the joke, is not a cheap and illicit one. Rather it has to do with the tortuous ardor that is studying for comps. This prerequisite for progressing on to my PhD dissertation often feels a curse, but then at other times (like this morning) it feels an exilerating blessing.
Here’s why. This morning it has finally “clicked” with me, after two and a half decades, what St. Anselm of Canterbury is “up to” in his works the Monologion and the Proslogion. In the closet of my study I have a 3-ring binder containing pages upon pages of class notes which I took in Philadelphia, in seminary, in 1998, on Anselm. (All these years later I realize more than ever that Dr. Claire Davis of Westminster Seminary is a brilliant man.) Yet, when I was in the class, or indeed when I tried to read Louis Mackey’s essay entitled “Grammar and Rhetoric in the Proslogium,” I was groping around in the dark.
I’d like to argue that what Anselm is doing, both in the Monologion and in the Proslogion, is tantamount to what Boethius is doing in his Theological Tractates, his opuscula sacra.[1] As Joseph Pieper suggests,[2] we find a description of this kind of rational thought in Thomas’ introduction to Boethius’ De Trinitate:
… just as our natural knowledge begins with the knowledge of creatures obtained by the senses, so the knowledge imparted from above begins with the cognition of the first Truth bestowed on us by faith. As a result the order of the procedure is different in the two cases. Philosophers, who follow the order of natural knowledge, place the sciences of creatures before the science of God, that is to say, natural philosophy before metaphysics, but theologians follow the opposite path, placing the consideration of the creator before that of creatures.[3]
Of note is the fact that both natural philosophers and theologians have knowledge of God, although this knowledge is delivered in different ways. For the natural philosopher, this knowledge of the divine (or of metaphysics) proceeds on according to Aristotle’s ordering of the sciences, proceeding from “that which is most knowable to us” to “that which is most knowable in itself.”
For the theologian, however, it is as if this heuristic process is short-circuited in a good way. The progressive ladder of scientific spheres is eclipsed, and the knower arrives immediately at the end of the sequence, having received, by the gift of faith, the knowledge of God. (Note that this knowledge of God, bestowed by grace through faith, has particular content, and is received by the intellectus fidei, that faculty which recognizes and grasps the deliverances of faith. In this sense it is structurally similar to the second-to-the-bottom position in Plato’s divided line: pistis. Part of what is in view here is that the content of faith, for premoderns like St. Thomas, does not stand in opposition to knowledge, but rather is a kind of knowledge.)
In contrast to the natural philosopher, then, the theologian begins at the end. He takes God—note that here the God of Scripture and Christian Tradition is taken to be identical to the theos of natural reason—as given, and then proceeds to attend to what follows logically from that point forward.
Anselm performs this method 500 years after Boethius himself had performed it, and it is described aptly in the Augustinian phrases fides quarens intellectum and credo ut intelligam.
In his Scholasticism, Joseph Pieper clearly thinks that Anselm carried his project too far, falling prey to the temptation of rationalism, and I don’t disagree with this diagnosis. Nevertheless, I also agree with Pieper’s final appraisal, namely that Anselm’s method is a kind of historically necessary “experiment” which tries to “test” certain “possibilities:”
On these grounds Anselm’s approach may have been a necessary first step from which ultimately Thomas’ balanced view would later be developed: that necessary reasons cannot demonstrate the tenets held by faith, but can show that they are not contrary to reason; and that such a use of the wisdom of the world is not a mixing of the wine (of theology) with the water (of reason), but should rather be called a changing of water into wine.[4]
[1] Joseph Pieper, Scholasticism, tr. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1984), 36-37. Pieper describes Boethius’ project as “the rational examination of dogma.” Note that the last sentence of Utram Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de Trinitate substantialiter praedicentur is an admonition to the later Pope John I to “join faith to reason” (“fidem, si poteris, rationemque conjunge”).
[2] Pieper, Scholasticism, 62.
[3] Thomas Aquinas, Faith, Reason, and Theology, Questions I – IV of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, tr. Armand Maurer (Rome: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987), 3-4.
[4] Pieper, Scholasticism 62, citing Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, 2.1 ad. 5 and 2.3 ad 5.
